From N40,000 and a Dream, How Ayuba Gayawan Built One of Adamawa’s Top Media Brands

The office is in Bekaji, right beside Unity Bank, and it is the kind of place that looks ordinary from the outside until you understand what it took to get it there; thats Gayawan!

Gayawan Media Nigeria Limited does photography, live streaming, media consultancy, and just about everything else that touches a lens or a microphone. Today it carries 14 staff on active payroll and 17 ad hoc partners. But when Ayuba Magaji Betimaniu Gayawan first picked up a camera in 2013, all he had was less than N40,000, a second-hand point-and-shoot Nikon from Onitsha market, and a decision that would quietly change the rest of his life.

“I started in 2013 with just some money that I came back with, less than 40,000 as a core member in my reserve,” he told The Gazette News. “I started this work and then realised that my point and shoot camera would not scale in the business, so I needed a DSLR camera.”

He was still serving in the National Youth Service Corps at the time, earning N48,000 a month. Photography was a side hustle suggested by a departing corps member who was leaving the space. It was not supposed to be anything more than that. Yet that informal nudge, taken by a young mechanical engineering graduate who had the instincts of a scientist and the ambition of an entrepreneur, eventually became one of the most recognised media brands in the North East.

The timing mattered. Nigeria’s creative economy, though still vastly underperforming its potential, employs 4.2 million Nigerians and has been estimated to add 2.7 million more jobs by 2025, according to Jobberman research. The creative sector contributed approximately 2.3 per cent to Nigeria’s GDP in 2022, a figure that reflects rising influence even as the industry remains underfunded and undervalued relative to benchmark economies. The federal government has since set an ambition to generate at least $100 billion annually from the creative economy, a target that sounds audacious until you consider that the sector has maintained a steady growth trajectory powered by digital adoption and a young, restless, talented population. Ayuba Gayawan did not wait for any of those projections. He moved before the numbers confirmed what he had already calculated.

The Loan That Changed Everything

When Ayuba realised the point-and-shoot camera had taken him as far as it could, he did not complain or wait. He went back to Onitsha, this time with a sharper target. A lab technician named Theophilus had told him plainly that the work was fine but that a DSLR would open a different kind of door. So he counted what he had saved, found it was not enough, and went to his mother.

“Thankfully, my mother believed in me,” he said. “She gave me a loan of 40,000, which I refund, added up to what I had, and I went and bought a DSLR.”

That camera, which he says he still keeps and cherishes today, was the turning point. Not because of what it could do technically, though it could do more, but because of what it meant to him internally. From the moment he held it, the question of whether photography was a hustle or a vocation was settled.

Ayuba had studied mechanical engineering. He sat with the numbers the way a science student would, tracked his income from the camera against what a conventional career might offer, and made a calculated decision. The photography would fetch him more than he could imagine. He went all in. His story mirrors a pattern familiar across Nigeria’s creative entrepreneurship landscape, where the decision to commit fully, rather than treating the work as secondary, is often the single variable separating those who build lasting brands from those who eventually walk away.

By 2017, he registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission and moved into a studio space, not because the work demanded it immediately, but because he understood something fundamental about trust and perception. Globally, approximately 68 per cent of photographers are self-employed, which makes the absence of a physical presence an easy reason for a client to hesitate. Ayuba understood this intuitively, without the statistics. A client who could trace you, who could walk through your door, who knew you had a physical address, was a client who would not panic about where their money had gone.

“I felt if I keep telling people that my location is at my back and my phone line is a reliable line to always call and get delivery, my client will not agree with me,” he said. “I swing into the studio space so that someone will understand, I am not about to go with their money. I am traceable, I’m trackable, I’m reliable.”

At the same time, Adamawa State itself was shifting. Governor Fintiri’s administration later launched an ambitious programme aimed at training and equipping 100,000 individuals with digital skills, entrepreneurship knowledge, and tools to thrive in the digital economy, through a partnership with Wootlab Innovation and Microsoft. Since inception, over 55,000 youths have been trained in various trades through the administration’s Skill Development Corridor, with a particular focus on ICT as the fastest-growing sector in Nigeria’s economy. Ayuba did not benefit from any formal government programme. He built his training pipeline himself, from the inside out. But the environment around him was gradually, if slowly, beginning to value what he had been doing long before anyone made it a policy.

What Social Media Doesn’t Post

Ask anyone in Adamawa State who knows photography, and Gayawan Media’s name comes up fast. Ayuba Gayawan’s online presence is clean, polished, full of beautifully shot weddings, corporate events, and government engagements. What the page does not show is the night he drove more than ten kilometres from a shoot only for the car to break down on the highway, forcing the team to find a mechanic and wait three to four hours before they could continue the journey.

It does not show the time he jumped from a stage and his trousers tore straight through the centre, and he finished the entire wedding reception that way, because the client’s day could not wait for his wardrobe.

“Social media don’t see the late night that I travel,” he said. “Social media don’t see when we are not branded and well dressed. There are days I am sick, I’m under medication, but yet I will still have to deliver the work.”

This invisible layer of professional sacrifice is not unique to him. Between 65 and 77 per cent of photographers globally reported increased business costs in 2024, yet pricing increases have not kept pace, creating a growing gap between expenses and earnings that poses a threat to profitability across the industry. In Nigeria, where inflation eroded purchasing power sharply through 2023 and 2024, the gap felt wider than the global average for most freelance and studio photographers. Equipment costs, imported in foreign currency, climbed. Fuel costs climbed. Data costs climbed. The work had to absorb all of it.

Ayuba told the story of a traditional wedding shoot that still sits with him. His videographer failed to capture the moment the bride’s father prayed over her, a moment nobody had listed in the brief but one the client would feel the absence of for the rest of her life. For six weeks, he followed up with the crew member, hoping the footage had simply been misfiled. It had not.

“I reached out to the client to let her know that that particular content was not recorded,” he said. “It’s difficult for us to have it add on the traditional wedding highlight. I told her plainly that the content is not available.”

His response was not to deflect or go silent. He sat with the client, acknowledged the loss, and worked toward whatever resolution was possible. If the moment could be recreated, they recreated it. If it could not, they grieved it together and found a way to continue the relationship with honesty intact. That approach, direct, accountable, and human, is part of why the brand has held for over a decade.

His bottom line when he started was to rank among the top three photographers in Adamawa State. By his own assessment, that goal was cleared three years ago. The new target is the entire North East.

“I didn’t start to stop halfway,” he said, “neither did I start not to be big and bigger.”

AI Is Not the Enemy, It Is the Tool

When the conversation turned to artificial intelligence, Ayuba Gayawan did not hesitate. Gayawan Media has not been sitting on the sidelines watching the technology arrive. The team has been in active use of it, for image enhancement, for restoring blurry frames that would otherwise be lost, and for cleaning audio so that a client’s original voice comes through clearly without sounding altered or processed.

“The more you interact with the tool AI, the more you understand that interface, and you get yourself acquainted to do so many amazing work,” he said.

His position reflects a broader shift happening across Nigeria’s media and creative industries. A 2024 survey on the use of AI in Nigeria’s film and television industry found that 35 per cent of stakeholders already use AI in their work, while another 35 per cent are actively considering its adoption. For photographers and videographers, AI has become most immediately practical in post-production. According to a 2024 Deloitte study, average visual production budgets in advertising dropped by 32 per cent since widespread generative AI tool adoption, as tasks that previously required full editing teams can now be compressed by a single operator armed with the right software. For a studio like Gayawan Media, operating in a market where clients are price-sensitive and turnaround time matters, that kind of compression is not a luxury; it is a competitive necessity.

Some of their audio productions, created under the Gayawan Media brand, have been composed with AI assistance, fed a few lyrics and an idea and shaped into something that surprised even Ayuba himself. He described hearing the finished product and feeling genuinely excited by what came out of it. For Nigerian creators broadly, AI has become the engine room for the productive, compressing the process of moving from a raw idea to a structured, deliverable output from hours into a matter of minutes.

His position on the broader existential question is settled. AI will not take the jobs of his team. He is certain of it. But the team that refuses to learn the tool will find itself outpaced by someone who did.

“I am determined to ensure that all my team members are actively in romance with AI, so that nothing looks new for them, and they don’t get out of the business,” he said.

The word romance is deliberate. It is not passive tolerance of a technology he does not fully understand. It is a conscious, ongoing engagement, close enough to be useful, careful enough not to become dependent on something that cannot replace the human eye or the human judgment behind every shot. Top Nigerian creators warn that AI typically does not understand Nigerian context and can exaggerate, and that authenticity and local relevance still come from lived experience. Ayuba knows this. His entire competitive edge is that lived experience, the ten kilometres of road, the torn trousers at the wedding reception, the six weeks chasing footage that was not there.

The clients have grown with him across borders. One, who first encountered his work back in 2013, has never met him in person. The man spent his formative years in Onitsha in the 1980s and now lives abroad. Over more than a decade, the two have never been in the same room, but the professional relationship has never lapsed. Ayuba once travelled to Onitsha specifically to shoot content for him, delivering it across borders through entirely digital channels. International NGOs consulting from Kenya have reached him through Abuja intermediaries. He has taken assignments in Kaduna and Kebbi State.

This cross-border reach is increasingly the direction of the industry. Nigeria led Africa’s entertainment and media sector in 2024 with a remarkable 11.2 per cent growth rate, with a compound annual growth rate through 2029 projected at 7.2 per cent, the strongest on the continent. Nigeria’s digital photography market alone is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 3 per cent, with a market size of $105.45 million in 2024, according to Cognitive Market Research. The numbers describe an industry with more headroom ahead of it than behind it. For a studio that has already spent twelve years building trust, that trajectory is not a threat. It is an invitation.

His advice to young creatives in Adamawa and beyond carries the same directness he brings to every client conversation. Stop giving your work away. Monetise what you create. Give yourself a time horizon and be honest with yourself about whether it is working.

“They should not keep giving out things for free,” he said. “Not even in free town are things free.”

And if the environment still feels slow to receive them, Ayuba says wait it out but keep working and keep charging. Adamawa State has changed, he says, genuinely. Politicians now need communication officers. Offices that once pushed back on soft copies now cannot function without content creators. A state that once told him his digital files were not worth paying for has come to understand that the creative who hands you both the seed and the harvest deserves to be paid for both. The Mastercard Foundation, which works across Adamawa specifically due to its high youth unemployment rate and the growth opportunities in its creative industry and digital economy, has identified the creative sector as a priority for job creation in the state, a recognition that what people like Ayuba built without government support is now attracting international investment frameworks.

The studio in Bekaji is proof that the environment turned. And Ayuba Magaji Betimaniu Gayawan, fourteen staff later, twelve years in, is proof that the person who refuses to stop halfway eventually gets to choose their own destination.